Prime Day Predictions, 2017

With Amazon Prime Day nearly upon us, we enlisted our panel of five million online shoppers to predict what is in store for Amazon’s shopping holiday.

Prime Day will be Amazon’s biggest day ever

Prime Day 2016 was Amazon’s biggest day ever with Amazon’s US sales volume (including Prime Now) 18 percent higher than the previous Cyber Monday. With Prime Day starting earlier and lasting longer this year, we expect growth of 20 percent over Prime Day 2016.

Past buyers will catch the Prime Day bug

In 2016, growth was principally driven by spend per buyer, which was 14 percent higher than in 2015. We also expect to see growth in spend per person as Amazon and its vendors should be sufficiently prepared for site traffic and for inventory needs on key products. There is still plenty of room for growth with Prime Day buyers as only 16.2 percent of past Amazon buyers bought on Prime Day last year.

Prime Day will drive expansion of key Amazon platforms

Amazon has historically used Prime Day very successfully to drive growth of its consumer platforms. Amazon Prime membership is the best example, of course, but the opportunity is much broader than bringing more Prime members into the fold. Amazon’s Echo, Kindle and Fire TV products accounted for 70 percent of the top 10 selling products. Each of these products, which are marginally profitable for Amazon, become buying platforms for Amazon shoppers for everything from toilet paper to electronic books.

New Amazon platforms are primed for Amazon’s shopping holiday

Prime Now, Amazon’s same day delivery platform, grew nearly twice as fast as Amazon’s overall sales between Prime Day 2015 and 2016. That growth, however, accounted for less than one percent of Amazon sales leaving a lot of room for more. We’re watching to see how many Amazon customers join Amazon’s Spotify competitor, Amazon Music Unlimited, which is hoping to entice users with a subscription of $.99/month for four months. We’re also very curious to see how the newest additions to the Echo family preform, especially the Echo Look, which is available and (at least briefly) in stock.

Shoppers will sleep in this year

In years past, the two biggest sales peaks came in the morning and afternoon of Prime Day. This year we expect the same with the key difference being that sales will start the evening before, which will allow the most ambitious deal seekers a good night’s rest.

Competitors will largely wait for Prime Day to pass

In 2015, many retailers created their own sales on Prime Day in a vain effort to draft off of Amazon’s holiday, but to no avail. In 2016, many Amazon competitors decided to save their sales for another day when there was less attention on Amazon–Amazon captured 75 percent of sales on Prime day compared with 29 percent the rest of the month. As tempting as it is for competitors to try to capitalize when shoppers have their wallet out, we believe that retailers will again save their promotions for another day.

About this data

With a panel of 5 million online shoppers, Slice Intelligence gives the most detailed, and accurate digital commerce data available, and is reported daily.

Slice Intelligence is the only service to measure digital commerce directly from the consumer, across all retailers, at the item level, and over time. Our retailer-independent methodology precisely measures commerce as it happens. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Slice can map the entire Purchase Graph, connecting each and every consumer to all their purchases.

Slice gets its data from e-receipts – not a browser, app or software installed by the end-user – so its measurement reflects comprehensive shopping behavior across multiple devices, over time which are key in an increasingly omnichannel retail world. Slice Intelligence is the exclusive e-commerce data provider for the NPD’s Checkout Tracking e-commerce service.

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